Comment by deergomoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deergomoo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure I buy this. My 2020 Civic has physical knobs and buttons for most† of the climate functions, media/radio controls, answer/hangup a call, lights, wipers, cruise control (including speed limiter and follow distance), driver's display, brake hold, eco mode, stop/start on/off, dampers, gears (though it's a manual so goes without saying), windows, mirror folding, and then a few down by my knee that I never need to touch like collision detection, traction control etc. I've edited this post four times already because I keep remembering more buttons it has.

With the regrettable exception of the couple of climate controls I detail below, the only functionality on the touch screen is stuff I shouldn't be fiddling with while in motion anyway: GPS, car settings, and anything that CarPlay displays. I know a Civic isn't a prime example of a "high tech" car, but it's a well-specced one and I'm struggling to think of much that substantially fancier cars have that would blow past a reasonable limit for physical controls.

† on/off, temp, screen blower, seat heaters, and defrosters all have physical controls. The manual fan speed and direction controls are on the touch screen. I wish they weren't, and I believe the newer 11th gen has restored these as physical knobs and buttons.

I was at a Honda dealership in late 2021 looking for a car, and I mentioned to the car salesmen how I don't like how touchscreen-dependent cars have become. Then ten minutes later he's showing me the touchscreen climate controls in a 10th gen Civic and talking about how cool they are.

I wound up getting a new 11th gen Civic since used cars were ridiculously expensive at the time, and I was very pleased to find that the touchscreen is only used for iOS/Android and some settings. The climate control knobs are imperfect though: for some reason they decided that the user should select which vents are active with an infinitely scrolling knob, so you can't utilize muscle memory, and you have to look at it while you're turning it. An improvement over the previous generation, but a step down from my dad's 1992 Civic.

Toyota has also swung back into the button direction. Only the CarPlay and a few of the backup camera controls use the touch interface (and the button I use most for the camera is a physical button). I’m sitting in my car right now waiting, and so just counted all the buttons I can reach while driving from the drivers seat and got to 95 including things like left toggle right toggle for the mirrors adjustment being two buttons, so being as liberal as possible in my definitions of a button or knob. There’s then a touch screen a little bigger than an iPad in the center console that has the Toyota infotainment stuff (which I disabled and opted out of the master data agreement so it does nothing) and CarPlay.

The thing is I intuitively know about 50 of them since I’ve been driving the vehicle about six months now.

2020 Audi A4 here: all AC controls, lights, wipers, cruise control, volume, speedometer display options etc. are phyiscal. Thank God. Of course being Audi it's a bit goofy at parts, but manageable. I cannot imagine having to touch a screen to skip a track or, God forbid, change the gear into reverse.

Of course it still has a touch screen display for all the usual carplay/android auto shenanigans.

Slightly older Audis (up through 2017-2019 depending on model) had a clickable wheel interface instead of a touchscreen. It's vastly superior, and I deliberately bought a used 2017 A4 to get it.

Yes, nothing will ever beat the old MMI when it comes to ease of use (especially once you got a hang of it and could do stuff "blind" without looking at the screen). Just wanted to say that this one still has more than enough in physical form; I also drive a 2022 A3 every now and again and I'd curse, for life, the person who figured out CAPACITIVE skip/volume/power on buttons are a good idea if I could.

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